Such was the design of the poet of _Christmas Eve_.
To topple over from the sublime to the ridiculous is not difficult.

But the presence of humour might save the sublimities from a fall, and Browning had hitherto in his art made but slight and occasional use of a considerable gift of humour which he possessed.

It was humour not of the highest or finest or subtlest kind; it was very far from the humour of Shakespeare or of Cervantes, which felt so profoundly all the incongruities, majestic, pathetic, and laughable, of human nature.

But it had a rough vigour of its own; it was united with a capacity for exact and shrewd observation; and if it should ever lead him to play the part of a satirist, the satire must needs be rather that of love than of malice.

One who esteemed so highly the work of Balzac and of Flaubert might well be surmised to have something in his composition of what we now call the realist in art; and the work of the realist might serve to sustain and vindicate the idealist's ventures of imaginative faith.